Richter AI Midjourney
Many alarm bells have been raised around the emergence of AI tools for writing, photography, video, and visual art. “It will be the end of artists as we know it.” “Creativity will be dead.” “Everything it makes looks like garbage!”
Alarm bells also rang out for a few other innovations you may have heard of in the world of art and entertainment:
Radio.
The motion picture.
The talkie.
Television.
The VCR.
Streaming.
Each time some paradigm-shifting technology was announced, people panicked and lamented the loss of “true” art. The death of the artist. The complete commercialization of aesthetics.
Well, it wasn’t true any of those times, and it isn’t true now.
Here at Richter, we just created a second showcase piece comprised entirely of visuals created in Midjourney…an AI-driven program that generates imagery from natural language descriptions.
I oversaw the creation of both of these videos, and you know what I realized? Neither of them would have been possible without a ton of creative effort and sheer man-hours. Writers, animators, VO artists, and editors all needed to work together to bring them to life, in a way that told a compelling story to the audience.
So when I think of the future of AI in art and entertainment, I see the technology being harnessed by groups of talented people to create things that never would have been possible before. What will those things look like? Who knows. Before the computer generated dinosaurs of Jurassic Park stomped onto the screen in 1993, moviegoing audiences couldn’t have imagined the kinds of spectacle we now see every summer movie season. Wherever AI takes us aesthetically, it’s going to be novel, unexpected…maybe even illuminating.
People will continue to spout their knee-jerk reactions about AI online and through social media. And that’s okay. Like the game-changing technology that came before it, AI is just another tool. It can be used to create work that’s shoddy, or unimaginably brilliant…but it can’t make anything on its own. It will always take the human touch - the work of the artist - to create something that resonates with the rest of the world.
